Popular Blue Flamingo Band Down Street had the privilege of playing at a beautiful wedding just over a month ago. The gorgeous venue was the Great Hall at Royal Holloway.
Here are some beautiful photos from Kit Myers Photography.

One of our epic party bands are playing at Floripa London this Wednesday 7th January 2014. Check out the Facebook event here and check out their website here. Playing all things pop, soul, motown, rock and all that’s in-between!

It was so exciting finally to see Alice Zawadzki and her band live and with the packed crowd at The Crypt, Camberwell this Saturday, South London was excited too.

Zawadzki is utterly captivating in every part of her performance. She can tell a story with her eyes alone, so when you add her voice, violin and the band you are willingly transported to another place.

Much of the music came from her recent album China Lane, starting the evening with its lead song Ring of Fire. Next up was Indome Para Marsilia, beguiling in its haunting beginnings, juxtaposed with pure groove. She sung masterfully in Ladino, and throughout the evening managed to sing in English, Swedish and Polish as well.

Zawadzki then moved on to Trochę Mitośći which was our favourite: texturally and harmonically it could be a Lied of the classical world. A song known to Zawadzki from her great aunt in Poland, it tells of a woman wanting the man with beautiful dark eyes. Zawadzki has a voice with many colours in it, folk, jazz, soul to name but a few, and here she starts with a sound clearly evoking the 1950s. Trochę Mitośći then morphs into a beautifully rhapsodic duet for violin and guitar. Who even knew this sound was possible.

Cellist Shirley Smart guested in a number of tunes, including a new song Superior Virtue. The song was a duet for Zawadski and Smart, and demonstrated gifted use of narrative and musical story-telling techniques.

In You as Man the strength of each individual band member was evident. Pete Lee on keys/synth put the Radiophonic Workshop to shame with his epic mastery of the Prophet 12. Alex Roth destroyed it with his solo there too. As did Tom McCredie. It’s a frankly ridiculous band. This is not to omit drummer Jon Scott. He was on it all night, and owned Cat, a song about ‘the soul of a cat getting into the body of a woman’.

She’s just totally on it all. At ease. It is a band that works well together, they know where to leave space for each other, where to sit. It’s a band that’s just right.

There are many more words we could write. But if words were adequate we wouldn’t have the music. You have to go and hear her. There is no genre that isn’t covered. In fact. Forget genre. She is her own new genre.

We’ve now downloaded the album, which you can do here. Naughty us. We really should have done it much earlier.

1. Ring of Fire (Zawadzki) ‘The magic and wonder of being being a teenager drunk on cider’

2. Indome Para Marsilia (trad. Sephardic arr Alex Roth, sung in Ladino) ‘A song about a girl flung far away from her homeland, wondering what the world will bring’

3. Trochę Mitośći ‘A Little Love’ (trad. Polish) ‘A lady who falls in love with a man with deep dark eyes. Sung by my great aunt Anna Borey Protassewicz during the fifties in Poland. She recorded loads of songs with the Radio Orchestra in Bydgoszcz and I transcribed with one off an old vinyl of hers and rearranged it.’

4. Dicho Me Habian Dicho (trad. Sephardic, sung in Ladino) ‘From the fifteenth centure, a time when Jews were expelled from Spain, a song of a girl worried nobody will marry her because of her skin colour’

Resident Studios were great – booking a Studio via online chat at 10pm has to be the most musician-friendly thing ever – and studio day was easy. We bought cheap parking permits for the whole day, unloaded easily and they had no qualms with us eating the pizza we called out for in the studio.

Resident have a number of options available – either hiring rehearsal spaces or recording studios. We decided to bring in our own engineer/gear with the fabulous Ali Thynne. We used Studio 1 (pictured), recorded the rhythm section live with ghost vocals and then added horns, synth layers and vocals later in the day.

What do you prefer? To get your own engineers and gear in, or to use what’s available at Recording Studios? Do you prefer recording live, or just multi-tracking completely separately? How many ears do you get to listen to a track before you’re happy, or is it just you?

We’re listening to and mastering the mixes – and we’ll let you have them soon. We’re hoping that another one of our groups, Down Street will be visiting Resident to do some recording in late August/early September.

Let us know if you’d like to contribute to our #musicalife blog, or if you have preferred ways of recording.

One of our most popular function bands, Jasper & Ruby, are playing live at Floripa London this Friday night… It’s free entry before 9pm – so why not start the bank holiday with some funky old school tunes! The Facebook event page can be found here.

2014 is the 250th Anniversary year of this fabulous French composer, and this is a rare and great chance to hear the beautiful motets: ‘In Convertendo’, ‘Quam Dilecta’ and ‘Deus Nost Refugium’. These three works are based on the Psalms and are performed by some of the world’s leading Early Music Performers.

You can hear them preview their work on BBC 3’s In Tune with Sean Rafferty on Tuesday 18th. It will be available to hear, here.